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Jake Knapp, a blogger and design partner at Google Ventures, knew
he had a problem. His smartphone, he said, made him “twitchy”
with anxiety -- to the point where he could not put it down.
Without enough willpower to resist an avalanche of distracting
apps, it felt as though his life were disappearing at lightning
speeds.

So Knapp concocted an experiment to make his phone
distraction-free. And what began as a trial run has evolved into
a full-throttle lifestyle transformation. One year later, he
writes via Medium, there’s no
looking back.

How did he do it? First, Knapp removed every app on his iPhone
that could theoretically lead to endless content streams. He
enabled a restriction in settings to get rid of Safari, deleted
all of his email accounts and also pushed a wiggly X on
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times.

While the newly scant screen was instantly soothing, there were
certain apps that Knapp chose to keep -- including Phone,
Messages, Camera and other “non-distractors” like Dropbox, Google
Maps and Uber. Of course, unmovable features like Passbook and
Game Center also remain fixed.

The payoff of the rejiggered homescreen? “Times on the bus when I
would’ve checked email, I listen to music or just look around,”
Knapp observes. “At home, the phone becomes part of the stereo,
and nothing more. At work, I set the thing down a lot.”

“The weird part is this: This experiment was supposed to be a
hardship. Now? It feels like the easy way out.”

Read Knapp’s full account of the experiment here -- where he’s also collaging images
of readers’ homescreens who are attempting to follow suit.